Total Victory at Coulston

Coulston Campaign Overview

In late summer 1993, IDA met with a prominent member of the biomedical research community and learned about the sordid story of the Air Force chimpanzees and the Air Force’s pending giveaway of these survivors of the U.S. space research program (and their descendants) to the notorious toxicologist Frederick Coulston.

Throughout the following year, IDA laid the groundwork for the investigation and campaign that would bring this scientist – who boasted about expanding the use of humankind’s closest genetic cousins for drug, chemical, pesticide and even cosmetic testing – and his laboratory to its knees less than a decade later. A crucial component of our investigation was cultivating and maintaining a network of whistleblowers that provided IDA with information on an ongoing basis about negligence and violations of federal law within The Coulston Foundation (TCF), the nonprofit company that Fred Coulston had created by consolidating his for-profit testing business in 1993.

Sadly, the information provided by these courageous whistleblowers included an ever-increasing death toll that reached at least 48 chimpanzees and monkeys by 2001.

A year into the IDA effort, Coulston was riding high. He boasted of cornering the market on chimpanzees and returning research to the way it was done in the 1970s, when far fewer protections for animals in laboratories were in place. He had grand plans of receiving a $40 million Congressional appropriation to support a national “Chimpanzee Aging Research Center” and was poised to take over New York University’s Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) and its 225 chimpanzees. TCF was flush with millions of dollars in funding from the federal government, through the National institutes of Health (NIH), and through private contracts with pharmaceutical, chemical and medical device companies.

By 1996, Coulston and his lab had control of an astounding 650 individual chimpanzees – almost half the U.S. population of chimpanzees in research laboratories. His goal of becoming the “sole source” of chimpanzees for research in the U.S. was well on its way to becoming reality.

Six years later – after an unrelenting IDA campaign – Coulston is utterly defeated, his laboratory and reputation obliterated. The NIH funding that kept the lab afloat ended in 2001. The lab’s private client base evaporated as its regulatory problems mounted. From internal NIH documents, we learned that Coulston directly blamed IDA – and our years-long campaign – for his financial woes.

Facing bankruptcy, a $1.2 million foreclosure lawsuit, almost $500,000 in tax liens from the federal government and the state of New Mexico, and lawsuits from creditors, Fred Coulston has sold the lab’s buildings and equipment, and donated the 266 chimpanzees and 61 monkeys, to the Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care, which operates a state-of-the-art sanctuary in Florida for 21 former Air Force chimpanzees.

(An additional 288 TCF chimpanzees were transferred to the NIH in 2000. The agency currently maintains these individuals at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. The Air Force has prohibited any testing or research to be conducted on the Base.)

When IDA reflects on its nearly nine-year effort, we remember those who have died – Donna, Ray, Eason, Holly, Muffin and all the other chimpanzees and monkeys who perished so cruelly because of TCF’s negligence and abuse – and we hold on to the thought that they have not died in vain. For it is the circumstances of their deaths – so callous, so inhumane – that prompted courageous TCF employees to come forward to IDA to provide the evidence necessary to bring TCF to its knees. We hope that by bankrupting TCF, we have obtained some measure of justice for James, Raymond, Jello, Echo and all the others who have died so horribly.

But it is not just the circumstances of their deaths, but their barren lives caged in the laboratory -- worrying when the next needle stick, liver biopsy, anesthesia dart, spinal experiment, friend’s death or baby ripped from his mother will come – that not only make us reflect on the Coulston campaign, but also to redouble our commitment to fight for an end to all research on chimpanzees. Currently, 1,400 chimpanzees remain imprisoned in U.S. labs. Our work will not be completed until each one is freed.

In conclusion, IDA expresses its deep appreciation to the courageous whistleblowers at TCF who over the years have provided us with the information necessary to take action against this laboratory, to our members, who have made our work over the past nearly decade possible, and to Animal Protection of New Mexico for their astute political and grassroots efforts on behalf of the chimpanzees at Coulston.

And finally, we will never be able to thank enough Dr. Carole Noon, Dr. Jane Goodall, the Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care and the Arcus Foundation, who have made our dreams a reality by stepping in and committing the vast resources and expertise necessary to rescue the Coulston chimpanzees and lovingly care for them for the rest of their lives. For the rest of our lives, we will be grateful beyond words to these caring individuals for providing an impossibly perfect ending to the long and arduous story of IDA vs. the Coulston Foundation.

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